For once, I agree with Roger Helmer MEP, which is rather disconcerting. Jeffrey Titford's Europhobic bluster is indeed as vacuous as we've all come to expect from the UK Independence party.

What actually is the point of having a UKIP MEP? We know their voting record is abysmal, as Roger points out. So do they, perhaps, help in holding the EU's executive to account - a responsibility you'd think rabid anti-Europeans would relish? No. UKIP's three MEPs managed to ask a grand total of one question between them at parliamentary question time - in the past five years! (By comparison, Labour have asked 329 and the Tories managed 131.)

On top of that, two of the three UKIP members have managed zero written questions to the commission, compared to Labour's 1089. And between them all they've written (wait for it) zero reports in committee, compared to Labour's 77.

You've got to feel sorry for the constituents who thought they might actually be getting representatives when they voted for UKIP in 1999!

That said, I hope Roger realises what he's signing up to when he agrees with UKIP's "good line in patter". This is a group that responded to recent letter-bomb attacks by saying it "understood" why terrorists might attack MEPs, then repeatedly refused to withdraw its remarks. This is a group which elected a known BNP activist to chair their Vale of York branch, and then expelled him just as it was about to be exposed. This is a group whose Eastern region MEP, Jeffrey Titford himself, used to be a member of the far-right New Britain party.

BNP and UKIP benefit from the same xenophobic fringe vote, of course - and they're taking advantage of it. I've looked at the stats. In West Yorkshire, my area's local elections, BNP and UKIP are putting up a total of 82 candidates - yet there's only one single ward (out of 125) where they're willing to stand against each other! If that's not evidence that the two parties came from the same gutter, I don't know what is.

So I have nothing more to say to Mr Titford, except to point out that I've been campaigning against rightwing extremism for most of my life. And I won't be stopping now.